Metro News & Reviews

Transportation headlines, Tuesday/Election Day, May 21

Here is a look at some of the transportation headlines gathered by us and the Metro Library. The full list of headlines is posted on the Library’sHeadlines blog, which you can also access viaemail subscriptionor RSS feed.

Happy Election Day to those voting today for mayor and other candidates/issues in the city of Los Angeles. To add a point to the first headline of the day, if you’re eligible to vote and fail to fulfill your civic duties, then you don’t get to gripe later about the many crucial decisions the next mayor will make about transportation in our area. Here’s the list of those issues!

Ten years and a Great Recession later, a new building will finally rise next to the Chinatown Gold Line station. It will have 240 residential units, 20,000-square-feet of retail and restaurant space and a walkway connecting the station to Broadway. The Source is always pleased to hear about new housing near transit — and hope such trends continue to spread north to other Gold Line stations where no development has occurred. I’m talking to you Heritage Square and Highland Park stations!

An interview with Metro’s Jody Litvak about the use of Facebook to collect official comments on the East San Fernando Valley Transit Corridor project. As far as Metro knows, it was the first time that social media was actually used for official comments. The idea is to make it as convenient as possible for more people to comment on impending projects.

D.J. Waldie does a nice job explaining the issue of density and how L.A. compares to other American cities, most notably New York. The gist of it: while New York has much higher concentrions of density in Manhattan, L.A. has an overall higher level of density over a larger area. It’s a salient point and a good argument for investing in transit here, but I also fret that people use this stat to wrongly suggest that L.A. is becoming Manhattanized. As a former Manhattan and Brooklyn resident, I don’t recall ever seeing one part of either borough that reminds me of Los Angeles. Or vice versa.